One of the things that I like most about Xcode is the auto-insertion of a closing curly-brace on the second line below whenever I enter an opening curly-brace, and the insertion of the cursor on the line in-between them. However, at heart I'm still a Vim guy, and tonight I got tired of actually typing that closing curly-brace. So, to make Vim automagically create my curly-brace blocks for me, I did the following.

In my .vimrc, I place the following lines

if has("autocmd")
autocmd FileType c source ~/.vim/brace.vim
autocmd FileType cpp source ~/.vim/brace.vim
autocmd FileType objc source ~/.vim/brace.vim
autocmd FileType java source ~/.vim/brace.vim
autocmd FileType pl source ~/.vim/brace.vim
endif


brace.vim is very simple, containing only the following line:

imap { {<CR>}<Esc>O


This causes typing a opening curly brace to immediately insert a Carriage Return character (equivalent to pressing return/enter) then inserts a closing curly-brace, then switching to command-mode and "typing" O to place an insert-mode cursor on a newly-inserted line above the closing curly-brace.

If anyone has a better way to do this, I'm open to suggestions.

For my webserver project I need to use queues. The main thread places connections that need to be serviced in a queue. "Worker" threads need to place log entries in a queue to be written out to the log file. These queues obviously need to be thread-safe. Writing a thread-safe queue is quite simple thanks to the NSLock and NSConditionLock classes. Just like any other semaphore, you create a NSLock object and surround your critical section with:

[myLock lock]
critical section...
[myLock unlock]

The real question I had to deal with here, though, was thoroughly testing my queues to make sure that they were _really_ thread safe. Unlike POSIX threads, Cocoa/Foundation has no mechanism for waiting on NSThread objects. But I needed to know that all of my testing threads were finished before I started comparing expected and actual results. The solution is not that difficult. The entry point/run loop for an NSThread object is a method with the mandatory signature:

(void) threadFuncName:(id)

So you create a struct or a class that has any data you need to pass in to your thread's main function. In addition, include in this struct or class an object of NSConditionLock. Immediately upon entry to the function, lock this with some condition code that will let your main program thread know that the thread is running. After spawning the thread, you want the main program execution to try and lock your condition lock when the run condition is no longer true. This will cause your main program thread to block and wait for your new thread to unlock with the condition you're waiting on. The last thing you'll want to do before your thread exits the run loop function is unlock the NSConditionLock with some condition that will let your main program thread know it's done. This will unblock your main thread of execution and you're off.
Sample code: (not complete, just the snippets that you'll need)



#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#define NOT_DONE 0
#define DONE 1

// this will need to be on some class that is calling the NSThread object
-(void) someFunc:(id) arg {
NSConditionLock* myLock = arg;
[myLock lock];
//do stuff that we need to know about in main
[myLock unlockWithCondition:DONE];
}


int main() {

NSConditionLock* finishedLock = [[NSConditionLock alloc]
initWithCondtion: NOT_DONE];

NSThread* myThread = [[NSThread alloc] initWithTarget:self
selector:@selector(someFunc:) object:finishedLock];

[myThread start];

[finishedLock lockWhenCondition:DONE];

// now we can do whatever we need to do with the results from
// the thread we spawned

}